Here’s Why There’s a Gun by My Head Every Night

"All theory, dear friend, is grey, but the golden tree of actual life springs ever green" - Goethe

---

When I go to bed, several things are on the nightstand beside me: a Google Home Mini, a flashlight, my CPAP, two bottles of water, a key fob for our alarm system, and a gun.

I wish I didn’t need that last item, but I do. I think.

Coming of age in the '80s, you’d think I was exposed to drugs. But I wasn’t—I never saw them.

I knew they were around, but they weren’t part of my world, so I developed a blind spot.

How blind? Pretty blind.

In the early '90s, I went to Vegas with my best buddy. I thought it odd that a FedEx envelope was waiting for him at check in, but never suspected it was filled with ecstasy, sent by his friendly—and enterprising—drug dealer.

And the 30 minutes he spent locked in the bathroom? I assumed he was just getting ready to impress the ladies, not snorting blow off the countertop.

His drug abuse continued for years, right under my nose, because I wasn’t looking for it. And I only realized how serious his problem was after he got sober.

---

My parents didn’t own guns. Neither did my friend’s parents. Nor was there much wild game in Huntington Beach, which meant there wasn’t even a local hunting culture.

Growing up, I only had two first-hand experiences with guns—and one was a BB gun.

It was my dad’s when he was a kid, and my buddies and I would sometimes take it to the side yard and shoot tin cans—and maybe the occasional cat.

Don’t worry; it wasn’t as cruel as it sounds. The gun was so weak that even if we were lucky enough to hit a cat, it would barely break stride before giving us an annoyed look.

My second experience was in Australia, when my friends and I went on an overnight camping trip to Wollongong, Gooloogong, or Dingoville—some Aussie-sounding town—with some locals.

After playing "Captain Puff"—an Australian drinking game—for hours, one of our new friends pulled out a .22 rifle and asked if we wanted to “throw some bullets on the barbie,” or something like that.

Everyone knows alcohol and guns mix, so we said, “Sure.”

I watched what the others did, and when it was my turn, I grabbed the rifle like I’d been born with it, cocked the handle thingy, aimed, and fired.

“Ptttt, ptttt, ptttt.”

It made such a weak, unthreatening sound that I wondered what all the fuss was about. After five or six shots, I lost interest and went back to downing cans of lukewarm Victoria Bitter.

It never occurred to me, then or later, that two things I had so little experience with—drugs and guns—would eventually intersect.

---

About 20 years ago, for reasons that are both uninteresting and irrelevant to this story, my mother-in-law ended up living alone in her large house.

Getting on in years, my wife’s family thought it best if somebody moved in with her—at least temporarily. Since my wife and I were the most geographically convenient, and sans children, we became that somebody.

I was okay with it. I liked my mother-in-law, as well as her house, and we had entertained the thought of buying it from her someday. The only problem was that moving in with her came with a catch—my brother-in-law, Gary.

A serial ne’er-do-well, he had a long history of going in and out of jail on various petty crimes and drug offenses. When we moved in, he was serving time, and I assumed that once he got out, he’d disappear as he’d done in the past.

Anyway, he was a grown man and not my problem. Or so I thought.

A few years went by, and two things happened: we had our first child, and my brother-in-law got out. But this time, he showed up at the house, and suddenly he was my problem.

My mother-in-law, bless her heart, has an unlimited supply of hope when it comes to her kids. That’s a good thing when you hope that they graduate college, get a good job, marry a loving spouse, and so on.

It’s not such a good thing when they’re a drug addict—and you hope that this time is different.

And with that philosophy unshakingly in place, she offered Gary his old room.

I was not down with this at all. If it had just been my wife and me, I probably would have been okay with it. But it was different now. I had a child.

Unfortunately, not my house, not my call. Sure, we could have moved out, but I was stubborn. Why should the person who does everything by the book be put out by the habitual rule-breaker?

Besides, I reasoned, the house would be ours soon enough.

---

Like an alcoholic after an all-nighter, Gary arrived during his post-incarceration honeymoon period, proclaiming that he had changed and would stay on the straight and narrow.

I wasn’t buying it.

For a while, everything was good. Then it went bad.

Things started mysteriously disappearing. But only things that had value at a pawn shop. Books, lamps, and dishes were safe, but digital cameras, gold jewelry, and electronics were like endangered species. (Insert the “Hmm” emoji here)

Then my mother-in-law’s credit card went missing. She insisted she misplaced it, but the charges that kept popping up on it at local electronics stores argued otherwise.

Things came to a head when everyone except Gary went out of town for a family event, and upon return, we found Gary, my in-law's mini-van, various pawnable items—and a glass beer pitcher I kept on my desk—gone.

The beer pitcher upset me the most. It had six hundred bucks in it, but I didn’t care about the money.

When my wife got pregnant, I started throwing extra change and bills into it to jump start a college savings fund. When my daughter was born, we created a real savings fund in the form of a 529b plan, but I continued “contributing” to the pitcher as both a tangible and sentimental reminder of my fatherhood.

And that fucker stole it.

A week later, the van turned up, totaled, by the side of the freeway. Gary had “sold” it to a homeless couple, who had—and I know I’m going out on a limb here—their own set of issues, as they were found wandering on the median, yelling at cars, and reeking of alcohol.

He got $500 for it.

Gary pulled his disappearing act for about a year, until he finally turned up—this time in the “big house,” state prison. I was glad and looked forward to being rid of him for 5 to 10 years—depending on good behavior. But alas, his crime, once again, was petty, and he was out in 18 months.

However, this time he didn’t come straight home. He went to a halfway house for a court-ordered substance abuse program, complete with a mentor and counseling. And six months later, when he darkened our door again, I thought maybe he’d gotten his shit together.

Actions speak louder than words, and for a while, Gary’s actions trued up with his “never again” rhetoric. He kept regular hours, attended support meetings, and got a job washing dishes at a bar around the corner.

Around this time, a few things happened: My mother-in-law moved out of state to take care of an even more elderly relative, we had our second child, and my wife and I started the process of making the house officially ours.

And since Gary seemed to have turned a corner, we let him stay. Still, I kept my eyes on him. The blind ones.

---

One day, while looking for something in my mother-in-law’s potting shed, I lifted a box and found a ceramic pipe, with what looked like some charred resin in the bowl. (Druggie lingo, pretty cool huh?)

Knowing my mother-in-law only shot heroin, I figured it wasn’t hers, so I ran up to Gary’s bedroom, kicked open the door, and began rifling through his dresser drawers, where I found twenty plastic tubes, each filled with what I knew from watching bad ‘70s cop shows was pot.

“That son of a bitch,” I thought to myself.

I was livid and ran downstairs to show my wife, who began with, “Why did you go into his room?”

Don’t even get me started on that one.

After screaming and yelling for what seemed like an hour, I walked into the backyard to calm down.

I’m a purist when writing, preferring to paint pictures with words. But this time I’m going break my rule to give you the full story.

---

---

This is the view looking out from my living room.

You’ll notice a long wood table just outside the double doors. That table is exactly where it was when I went outside to cool down. Except, on that day, it had a lot of small potted plants on it—legacies from my mother-in-law’s green thumb.

Or so I thought.

I paced back and forth and around the table for 30 minutes, trying to figure out what to do. Then I stopped and sat on top of it, at the far end. As I kept thinking, I casually glanced down the length of the table, noticing that a few of the plants had small plastic naming stakes stuck in their soil.

I read the one closest out loud.

“Super Lemon Haze.”

Then the next one.

“Platinum OG.”

Suddenly, I heard the voice of Sgt. Joe Friday in my head, “It’s pot, weed, grass, reefer, Mary Jane,” followed by, “You idiot!”

---

---

“No way,” I thought. “This can’t be pot.”

The idea that Gary had the balls to grow pot in my backyard—and that I had walked by it hundreds of times—seemed impossible.

So I did what any close-to-Boomer-but-still-Gen-X’er would do: I snapped photos of the plants and texted them to the tech team at my startup.

“They’re Millennials,” I thought. “They can tell me if this is really pot.”

The response I got didn’t make sense, as everybody—rightly so—thought I was joking.

I finally had to call one of them.

“Adam,” I said. “Are these pot plants?”

“You’re kidding, right?” he replied.

“No, I’m dead serious. I don’t know.”

He must have sensed the tension in my voice because his tone became more earnest as he confirmed that “yes,” they were pot plants. It wasn’t until he got off the phone that—or so I was later told—he and the rest of the team burst out in laughter at my naivete.

At this point, if there were any flammable chemicals around, my head would have ignited them because I was on fire. I ran back to the potting shed and started tearing it apart. What I found only increased my cranial temperature.

Big Bud Advanced Liquid Nutrients. Earth Juice. Reefer Grow. Top Crop (Organic).

The shed was full of fertilizers and nutrients, all designed for growing pot. I also found a pair of magnifying goggles, which even I knew—from my visit to Amsterdam—were used to examine the quality of THC crystals on leaves and buds.

“I’m going to kill him,” I said to my wife, showing her the current crop growing on the table. “He has until Friday to get out or I’m going to throw all his stuff in the yard,” I threatened.

And then, just as I was about to go back inside, something caught my eye. The potted plants—actually, more like small trees—that were lining the edge of our patio.

---

---

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding?” I said to nobody in particular. “How could I have missed all this?”

Simple. I wasn’t looking for it.

---

At his core, Gary was a good guy. I liked that guy. I really did. And though I knew he would never intentionally do something to hurt me or my family, I had to kick him out, because that Gary didn’t exist anymore.

He’d been replaced—a long time ago—by someone else. Someone who smoked meth and sold pot in between shifts to patrons and employees of the bar where he worked.

Someone who consistently made bad decisions.

I evicted him, not to protect my family from Gary, but from the potential consequences of those bad decisions he continued to make.

What if the police got a tip that he was dealing and busted the door down in the middle of the night?

What if his weed plantation was discovered and we lost the house due to some drug seizure law? (Which was possible in pre-legalization days.)

That would suck. But I had other concerns. Concerns that were much more ominous.

What if he screwed somebody in a deal and they decided to come looking for him?

What if some of his drug addict friends needed money and figured they’d break into “his” house and rip him off?

So, I got a gun.

A Glock 17 with two 10-round clips, you know, just in case Russian paratroopers invade. I’ve seen Red Dawn.

It’s been almost 15 years since I gave Gary the boot, and there haven’t been any problems. He’s continued to bounce in and out of jail, but knows he’s not welcome in our home, and has stayed away.

But when he gets out of prison, he still gives his cellmates our address, and every year or so, we get an envelope, postmarked from Folsom, Vacaville, or Solano, and stamped in bright red, all-caps letters: STATE PRISON GENERATED MAIL.

And that’s why, every night, the gun sits on the nightstand, a couple feet from my head, and every morning, it goes back in a lockbox.

Do I feel safer? Sort of.

Do I feel safe? Not completely.

I never wanted a gun, but I weighed the math of having a gun in a house against the math of being completely defenseless against a couple of meth heads—and the gun won.

What do you think? Did I make the right decision? What would you have done? Let me know in the comments below.